It is a deep part of human nature that we compare ourselves
to other people. A particularly
interesting kind of comparison is the upward
comparison in which you focus on someone you think is better than you in some
way.
When you make an upward comparison, there are a number of
different emotional reactions you might have.
As a sax player, I often get to hear amazing musicians play. One reaction to hearing a great musician
would be to admire their skill. A second
reaction would be to wish that I could play as well. This kind of emotional reaction is a benign
envy. I want what the other person
has. A third reaction would be to feel a
more destructive envy in which I recognize that the other player is better and
with that something bad would happen to that player.
An interesting paper by Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg,
and Rik Pieters in the June, 2011 issue of Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that benign envy may be
particularly useful in getting people motivated to work harder.
In one study, college students were first put in a mindset
that behavior change is easy or a mindset that it is hard. These mindsets emerge from research by Carol
Dweck and her colleagues, and I have written about them before in this
blog. Participants who were given a
mindset that change is easy read about a person who overcame many obstacles to
become a famous scientist. Participants
who were given a mindset that change is hard read about a person who was always
on the road to being a great scientist and ultimately became a famous
scientist.
After reading this passage, participants read a newspaper
article about an excellent student who did well in a national academic
competition. After reading this article,
participants rated how much they felt benign envy (wanting to be like this
student), admiration (appreciating what the student had accomplished) and more
malicious envy. Finally, the
participants did what seemed like an unrelated study. As part of that study, they estimated how
many more hours they planned to study in the next academic semester.
Participants who were given the mindset that change is easy
tended to feel benign envy toward the excellent student they read about. In contrast, participants who were given the
mindset that change is hard tended to feel admiration toward the excellent
student.
When asked later about study time, those people who thought
that change is easy expressed that they planned to study more than those who
thought change was hard. A previous
study in this series showed that having some kind of upward social comparison
was important for influencing effort on a task, so it wasn’t just the
manipulation of mindset that affected the results.
There are two key lessons for self-improvement here. First, keep an open mind about change. If you put in the effort, then your
performance will improve. I may never be
as good a sax player as some of the great musicians I hear, but I can get
better. Second, when you compare
yourself to others, it is fine to envy what they have, as long as you use that
envy to make yourself better rather than to tear other people down.
